While the most severe fires ever recorded burn throughout the west, and in Sweden, as predicted by climate change models, Trump pays off the oil and coal industry. And the righties here repeat the talking points of paid flacks for environmental destruction.

Quote:

By Chris Mooney
August 14 at 11:00 AM

The past four years have been the four warmest ever recorded — and now, according to a new scientific forecast, the next five will also probably be “anomalously warm,” even beyond what the steady increase in global warming would produce on its own.

That could include another record warmest year, even warmer than the current record year of 2016. It could also include an increased risk of heat extremes and a major heat event somewhere in the Earth’s oceans, of the sort that have triggered recent die-offs of coral reefs across the tropics.

“What we found is that for the next five years or so, there is a high likelihood of an anomalously warm climate compared to anomalously cold,” said Florian Sevellec, a scientist at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, who co-authored the study published in Nature Communications with Sybren Drijfhout of the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom.

The Earth is warming, but this does not mean that every year is warmer than the previous one. Rather, there is an overall warming trend — meaning that each successive decade tends to be warmer than the last — but also plenty of bouncing around among individual years in how hot they get.

One key determinant of a year’s temperature is what scientists sometimes call the climate’s “internal variability,” as opposed to the contribution of human-released greenhouse gases. The new forecast for 2018 through 2022 arises from projecting how this internal or natural variability will play out.

During the so-called global warming “hiatus” during the 2000s, for instance, these internal factors, such as oscillations in the Earth’s oceans, helped keep the planet somewhat cooler than it might otherwise have been and blunted the pace of warming — launching a long-running scientific debate and 1,000 political talking points.

Now, though, these same internal factors are poised to do the opposite, says the new research (whose authors also note that their technique can successfully capture the earlier “hiatus”). And assuming that the steady rate of global warming continues, that means already rising temperatures will get an added boost.

The study mines data from 10 existing climate change models, or simulations, to determine which do the best job of capturing how natural factors are contributing to the planet’s temperature. Then it projects forward using the same simulations to see how these factors will play out over the next five years.

It’s important to underscore that the result is a forecast based on probability — not a certain outcome. The study finds a 58 percent chance that the Earth’s overall temperature from 2018 through 2022 will be anomalously warm based on these factors, and a 69 percent chance that the Earth’s oceans will be. This includes, for the Earth’s oceans, “a dramatic increase of up to 400% for an extreme warm event likelihood” during 2018 to 2022, the study reports.

Already, 2018 is shaping up to be a pretty warm year — although not record-breaking. For instance, the period from March through May of this year was .87 degrees Celsius (1.57 degrees Fahrenheit) above the planet’s average from 1951-1980, making that the third-warmest such stretch in the temperature record, according to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

It’s too early to determine where the year as a whole will rank. According to NASA, 2016 was the warmest year on record, followed by 2017, 2015 and 2014.

Two scientists that The Post asked about the new research had different views.

The study “offers a new and promising low-cost approach to forecasting near-term variations in global average surface temperature,” said John Fyfe, a climate scientist at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis. “Results indicate that internal variations in the climate system will likely cause the surface to warm substantially above that expected from increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere — at least for the next five years. This is important information for scientists, policymakers and society writ-large.”

But Gavin Schmidt, who directs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that the size of the effect isn’t very large, noting that for 2018, the technique predicts just two hundredths of a degree Celsius of added warming for the planet as a whole.

“Let’s be clear, being 58% confident that 2018 will be 0.02ºC above the forced trend . . . is not practically significant (even if it might be skillful)," Schmidt wrote in an email.

He also noted that the central factor in determining unusual warmth in any given year is whether it is an El Niño year — as 2016 was. But while scientists are monitoring whether the Earth is or isn’t trending toward El Niño, the study does not attempt to predict that.

Schmidt also questioned whether the warm incursion implied by the new study would be as significant an event as the so-called global warming “pause” or “hiatus” of the 2000s.

“Note that the ‘hiatus’ was an issue because it went against the mainstream narrative, a slightly higher couple of years won’t. And as we have stressed for decades, it’s the long-term trends that matter,” he wrote.

There’s one thing nobody can deny — the next 54 months (including this July, for which the temperature has not yet been reported by NASA) will definitively test the new forecast.

“It is one study, and what will be interesting is that now there will be a lot more that we’ll also test and try to see if our prediction is right or not,” Sevellec said.

The number of days marked by potentially destructive ocean heatwaves has doubled in 35 years, and will multiply another five-fold at current rates of climate change, scientists warned Wednesday.

Even if humanity does manage to cap global warming "well below" two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), as called for in the Paris climate treaty, marine heatwaves will sharply increase in frequency, intensity and duration, they reported in the journal Nature.

Compared to hot spells over land, which have claimed tens of thousands of lives since the start of the century, ocean heatwaves have received scant scientific attention.

But sustained spikes in sea-surface temperature—typically to a depth of several metres—can also have devastating consequences.

A 10-week marine heatwave near western Australia in 2011, for example, shattered an entire ecosystem and permanently pushed commercial fish species into colder waters.

Another ocean hot spell off the coast of California warmed waters 6 C (10.8 F) and lasted for more than a year. Known at "The Blob", it generated toxic algae blooms, caused the closure of crab fisheries, and led to the death of sea lions, whales and sea birds.

"Marine heatwaves have already become longer-lasting and more frequent, extensive and intense in the past few decades," lead author Thomas Frolicher, an environmental physicist at the University of Bern, Switzerland, told AFP.

"This trend will accelerate in the future under further global warming."

Coral reefs—which cover less than one percent of the ocean's surface but support a quarter of marine species—are especially vulnerable to warming waters.

The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consulate, at Bergen, Norway. Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone.
Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes.
Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the Gulf Stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.
Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most coastal cities uninhabitable

I must apologize. I neglected to mention that this report was from November 2, 1922, as reported by the AP and published in The Washington Post - 93 years ago
Must have been caused by the Model T Ford emissions........

The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consulate, at Bergen, Norway. Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone.
Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes.
Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the Gulf Stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.
Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most coastal cities uninhabitable

I must apologize. I neglected to mention that this report was from November 2, 1922, as reported by the AP and published in The Washington Post - 93 years ago
Must have been caused by the Model T Ford emissions........

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